A former member of the House of Representatives, Hon. Musibau Kolawole Taiwo, has said that the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is strengthening the economy and tackling insecurity on multiple fronts. Taiwo also dismissed claims that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is targeting only members of the opposition.
According to him, the commission has investigated members of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), including a former Governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello, despite his affiliation with the APC.
The APC chieftain further stated that political dynamics are already shifting since the 2023 general elections and are likely to change even more ahead of 2027, notwithstanding efforts by opposition figures to regroup under the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in preparation for the next general elections. He spoke on these and other issues in an interview with OLADIPUPO AWOJOBI. Excerpts:
What is your view on the newly passed Electoral Act by the National Assembly, which provides for manual recording of election results where there is network failure?
We should allow the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to determine what they want. I don’t know why some of our people think that the provision is wrong.
Even in private businesses, people don’t rely on digital form solely and where they do, they have backups because it can fail. You can imagine a process that would hold for three or four hours, what would happen when there is a problem? It’s even better for you to allow the umpire to determine what they want to use.
In Nigeria, we have people that can manipulate anything. They even tried to hack the system of INEC about one thousand times during the 2023 general elections and you still want them to rely on such system. We must not deceive ourselves; even in transferring money to someone through your phone, it can hang throughout the day sometimes.
Is it not the same system that we are using? The receiver may not get the money throughout the day and it would be like that if you don’t lodge complaint. So there must be other options.
What people are saying is that in some of these places that they say there is no network, bandits send messages from there and that some of these places with no network can be left out…
They should leave some places out on an election day? You must be fair to everybody there should be a level playing ground for everybody. If you leave some people out, problem can start from there and that might be the catchment area of some of the parties.
Nobody is saying that they should not use electronic transfer, what we are saying is that they should leave INEC to determine what they want to use. There is no place in the world, where they use electronic transfer without backups.
Even in the United States of America, they count the results manually and they record. For instance, BVAs is no more new in Nigeria, even IRev is used in some of the off-cycle elections. The parties can even print the results as shown in IReV. I don’t know why we are so particular about this. The rule says a party must have agents in all the polling units in the country.
But that may be difficult for some parties…
Then, they are not parties; even in the USA, there are some small parties that contest smaller elections until they are able to have the spread for bigger elections. If you know you don’t have the spread don’t do it then. Elections are about money, you must look for members to donate money for elections.
Another contentious area in the Electoral Act is the issue of direct primaries and consensus as against indirect primaries; would you say this is okay?
I know why they did that. I was a member of Electoral Matters in the House of Representatives; we didn’t know when we isolated ourselves from the scheme of things because it gave the powerful ones the opportunity to manipulate the elections because of the fewer number of people that participated in them because it is indirect.
Consensus has always been the basis for rigging; I don’t know why they still keep it in the law. My own definition of consensus is that the leaders would decide the process; it doesn’t mean that they would stop anyone from contesting, but they would tell their people that this is the person we want.
That is what we do in Lagos, President Bola Tinubu would send message to us that this is the person we want may be for governorship, and we will pick the person. There is no time that he would pick somebody and impose him on us.
But, why is he doing that?
He is the leader and the followers are also leaders in their own right. It is when you put everything together that the winner will emerge. That is the consensus that I am talking about, not the one that you will sit down somewhere and pick somebody and tell others to go to blazes. That one is bringing problem.
May be the Electoral Act should have defined that…
They would not; what they now did that is so spectacular, is that consensus can only be consensus if all the contestants agree to it.
But that’s not the case here…
No, that is the reason the contestants must agree. If the leadership of the party that has followers come together and say this is the person we want, then others will agree because if anyone goes to the election without the support of the leaders he or she would lose since the entire leadership is not supporting him or her.
I remember for the local government chairmanship election in 1998/1999, our leader in my area, Baba Badmus, made sure that all the other leaders agreed with him.
They asked me to step down on the day of the primary. I knew I could not go it alone, and our party won eventually. It is when the party wins that the leaders have won and they must find consensus. They are not saying people should not contest, but they would tell you this where they are going.
Can you clear the air on the belief that the APC is only fighting the opposition on corruption? For example, it is believed that the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, is being probed because he left the APC though we know that Malam Nasir el-Rufai caused problems for himself, also there is the issue of Yahaya Bello that was being prosecuted by the EFCC…
Sometimes, I ask questions about what Nigerians want. What concerns them about somebody being arrested? What should concern them is if the person actually committed the offence.
The Economic and Financial Crimes (EFCC) is not a creation of the All Progressives Congress (APC), it was created by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). I know it normally takes time for investigations to make their jobs easy, sometime they go for plea bargaining. They are dealing with VIPs and not common criminals.
You will keep asking them questions. EFCC has a budget and if they are running out of budget for that year, they would not go to courts again. These are difficult things, but people would just sit in their corners and make pronouncements that are not possible.
They make it look as if it is APC thing. Politics is about interest, it is not just about friendship. Some people are pro-Atiku Abubakar, the day he moved to the African Democratic Congress, they moved with him from the PDP. The day Peter Obi moved to the ADC, some people moved with him, so it’s about interest.
When they say someone has stolen about N400 billion, Nigerians should be interested in that. El-Rufai was in the PDP. He made noise that they wanted arrest him at the airport and he resisted arrest. He later went to a national television to say all sorts of things.
The EFCC is not an arm of the APC. It’s under the government and not under any party. The same EFCC is probing APC members. They were the ones that said that they wanted to arrest Yahaya Bello, if they didn’t say it, would the people know even as an APC member.
I know why former President Olusegun Obasanjo created the EFCC; he didn’t create it to run after corrupt people, he created it to deal with the people that were against his third term ambition.
You can see that he dealt more with members of the PDP than the people in the opposition. As times went on, the EFCC began to evolve, they are now free and they can invite anybody for questioning.
It is believed that if the ADC fields Atiku Abubakar and Mr. Peter Obi in the 2027 general elections, then they would spring a surprise, do you agree with them?
The 2023 general elections took place pre-President Bola Tinubu’s administration and 2027 is post-Tinubu’s administration. So, if you want to judge the two figures, I don’t know the indices you will use.
But, will it not be worse with the level of insecurity in the country now?
What do you mean by worse, somebody is strengthening the economy and you are saying it is worse.
But, we have serious insecurity issue in North Central such as Kogi, Kwara States, even in Oyo State and in some other places…
It’s not getting serious; you are unfair if you are talking like this. One of the reasons we are having insecurity is because of some bad roads in the country.
It used to be like that before the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway was repaired. But now there is nothing like that on the road again. It is anyone that wants to die that would cross the express to stop any vehicle for kidnapping.
We are having insecurity due to economic reasons; it takes a lot to kidnap people in a luxurious bus because there are some areas where the vehicle would get to zero acceleration.
But those things are no more. So, insecurity is decreasing now, in the past it got to a stage where people could not move or else they travel by air, but now people are moving freely unlike before.
Insecurity is a continuous problem; it’s not something that somebody can say that he has solved the problem and go to sleep, which is why they said if you see something, you must say something. Those who perpetrate it don’t stay there for more than five or 10 minutes.
In the 80s, the Americans produced many films on kidnapping as they were being kidnapped. Even until recently, people were kidnapped there in the ’80s, they were forced to live with them, and bear children for them till early 2000.
What do you think President Tinubu should do about Nnamdi Kanu? A monarch from the South East recently advised that he should be released and allowed to go to Kenya if the government does not want him in Nigeria?
I don’t know what President Bola Tinubu can do about his matter as Nnamdi Kanu was jailed by a court and he has appealed. It is only when the Supreme Court gives final judgment that the President can now come in.
